Overview

UAE based company Gulftainer is the largest privately owned, terminal operator in the Middle East. Its international presence spans over three continents including the Middle East and the Americas. For more than 38 years, Gulftainer has been delivering world-class performance to its customers, continually striving for a faster turnaround of cargo, trade and fortunes for promising new economies.

To achieve its goal of sustainable growth Gulftainer continues to enhance its performance as one of the most productive port operators in the world, ensuring that its customer service outperforms competitors in the markets in which it operates. In 2013, Gulftainer accomplished a significant throughput of 6 million TEUs (Twenty-Foot Equivalent Unit) at its terminals. This achievement reinforces Gulftainer’s position as one of the leading Private Companies in the region for Port operations and management.

Challenges

Security has always been a top priority for Gulftainer and it is important to standardize and centralize IT security solutions. Gulftainer’s IT department found the answer with Enterprise security solutions. Following a detailed review of the process, Trend Micro’s™ Enterprise Security solutions were selected to provide a data center security solution.

Ensuring that updated patches were validated and applied to servers was essential to guaranteeing the company’s security status. “It was a time-consuming exercise to apply patches for our virtual and physical servers, which had no automated patching,” said Jurageswaran Shetty, IT Security Manager.

Why Trend Micro

After evaluating several leading security solutions, Gulftainer found that the Trend Micro™ Enterprise Security Suite (ESS) solution provided the functionality it needed, including integrated data loss prevention (DLP), which secures mobile and USB devices, as well as email.

“When we deployed the Trend Micro solution, the software was capable of identifying thousands of threats and malwares, thereby giving us the comfort that Trend Micro could provide the advanced security we needed to keep our system secure and available to our end users,” said Vinay Sharma, Group IT Manager.

Prior to the deploying Deep Security, only Gulftainer’s Windows and Linux servers were protected with the previous AV product. “Deep Security integrated with all of our environments, which simplified our security management,” said Sharma.

The Deep Security agentless security platform uses resources more efficiently, supports higher virtual machine densities and is easier to manage than traditional anti-malware solutions. The platform saves the time and effort of Gulftainer’s IT staff from continually configuring, updating, and patching client and server agents. The solution’s web reputation, integrity monitoring, and bidirectional firewall capabilities add layers of defense to keep Gulftainer’s network available 24/7.

"The concept of the agentless virtual appliance Deep Security solution simplifies security processes considerably and allows for a more efficient utilization of resources, especially when compared to conventional anti-malware solutions."

Vinay Sharma
Group IT Manager, Gulftainer

By consolidating all security responsibilities onto one comprehensive platform, Deep Security simplifies management and expands visibility across the network. “The Trend Micro™ Control Manager™ console makes it easy to see what’s happening in our production environment and alerts us if any issue requires attention,” said Shetty. “The added capability allows us to take immediate action to prevent business disruptions and reduces the time we spend on incident management. In addition, the reporting process provides additional insight into the effectiveness of our security efforts.”

Results

“With Trend Micro OfficeScan protecting our endpoints and Deep Security protecting our server environment, Gulftainer is confident its network is guarded by the best available security solutions,” said Shetty.

Gulftainer is also pleased with the results produced by the OfficeScan and its mobile security components of the Trend Micro Enterprise Security Suite. “From detecting and cleaning out thousands of malware threats in our environment, to preventing data loss and protecting our mobile devices, Trend Micro has really shouldered the security burden for us, which frees our IT team to focus on more important issues,” said Shetty.

"Upon switching to Trend Micro solution, the number of security-related issues have dropped by 30-40%."

Vinay Sharma
Group IT Manager at Gulftainer

What's Next

“In the near future, we are looking at deploying the Trend Micro Encryption system to add yet another layer of security protection,” said Shetty. “And, once we complete our ISO 27001 certification, we will look at deploying the Trend MicroTM Deep Discovery system to mitigate targeted attacks.”